The GCHQ program saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds. Photograph: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Optic Nerve: millions of Yahoo webcam images intercepted by GCHQ

Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.GCHQ
files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance
program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo
webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of
whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.In
one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery –
including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications –
from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally. GCHQ
does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US
citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no
restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by
British analysts without an individual warrant.The documents also chronicle GCHQ's
sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery
collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there
is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this
material in the first place. Read the rest -Guardian

The National Security Agency (NSA) is in the information harvesting business — and business is booming. That's why the nation's premier covert intelligence gathering organization has been building a million square-foot data mining complex in Bluffdale, Utah, that will house a 100,000 square foot "mission critical data center."The NSA's official mandate is to listen to and decode all foreign communications of interest to the security of the U.S.

One Fox News report says as much as 5 zettabytes — 1 zettabyte = 1 billion terabytes = 1 trillion gigabytes — and with just 1 zettabyte (1024 exabytes) of space, the NSA can store a year's worth of the global Internet traffic (which is estimated reached 966 exabytes per year in 2015).